Barbara Demick and Julie Makinen

Beijing: Malaysian authorities have identified one of the two men who used stolen passports to board a missing Malaysia Airlines jet, the nation’s inspector general of police told media on Monday, as international search teams continued to look - so far unsuccessfully - for wreckage from the aircraft.

Civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman declined to confirm this, but said they were of "non-Asian" appearance, adding that authorities were looking at the possibility the men were connected to a stolen passport syndicate.

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With no confirmation that the Boeing 777 had crashed, hundreds of distraught relatives waited anxiously for any news. The aircraft disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Military personnel work within the cockpit of a helicopter belonging to the Vietnamese airforce as they search for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER jetliner. Photo: Reuters

As relatives of those on the flight grappled with fading hope, attention focused on how two passengers managed to board the aircraft using stolen passports. Interpol confirmed it knew about the stolen passports but said no authorities checked its vast databases on stolen documents before the jet departed.

Warning that "only a handful of countries" routinely make such checks, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble chided authorities for "waiting for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates."

The stolen passports, one belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel and the other to Italian Luigi Maraldi, were entered into Interpol's database after they were stolen in Thailand in 2012 and last year, the police body said.

Thai police and Interpol questioned the proprietors of a travel agency in the resort town of Pattaya that sold one-way tickets to two men now known to have been travelling on flight MH370 using the stolen passports.

The search continues ... a military serviceman looks out of a helicopter during a search and rescue mission off Vietnam's Tho Chu island. Photo: Reuters

There has been no indication that the two men had anything to do with the tragedy, but the use of stolen passports fuelled speculation of foul play, terrorism or a hijacking gone wrong. Malaysia has shared their details with Chinese and American intelligence agencies.

The men were scheduled to connect in Beijing for flights to Europe. The police in Pattaya said the tickets were bought not by the passengers themselves but by an Iranian man known to the police only as Mr Ali.

Supachai Phuikaewkhum, the chief of police in Pattaya, said in an interview late on Monday that Mr Ali, who formerly lived in Pattaya and operated a restaurant there but now appears to have moved back to Iran, was a regular customer of the travel agency.

Colonel Supachai said Mr Ali called the agency from an Iranian telephone number and asked for the cheapest fares available from Kuala Lumpur to two separate destinations in Europe.

"The staff suggested that a flight with several stops would be cheaper, so he picked that route,” Colonel Supachai said.

He said the tickets were paid for in cash by another Iranian man, “Asay”. That man was questioned by the police on Monday, he said.

Electronic booking records show that one-way tickets with those names were issued from a travel agency in Pattaya on Thursday.

Colonel Supachai said those reservations were placed with the agency by a second travel agency in Pattaya, which told police it had received the bookings from a China Southern Airlines office in Bangkok.

The owners of the second Pattaya travel agency refused to talk to reporters. Thai police and Interpol officers went in to question the owners.

A telephone operator on a China-based KLM hotline confirmed on Sunday that passengers named Maraldi and Kozel had been booked on one-way tickets on the same KLM flight, flying from Beijing to Amsterdam on Saturday. Maraldi was to fly on to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Kozel to Frankfurt, Germany.

As holders of EU passports with onward flights to Europe, the passengers would not have needed visas for China.

Interpol has long sounded the alarm that growing international travel has underpinned a new market for identity theft. Bogus passports are mostly used by illegal immigrants, but also pretty much anyone looking to travel unnoticed such as drug runners or terrorists. More than 1 billion times last year, travellers boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol's database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, it said.

Mr Azharuddin also said the baggage of five passengers who had checked in to the flight but did not board the plane were removed before it departed.

Airport security was strict according to international standards, surveillance has been done and the airport had been audited, he said.

The search for wreckage continues

On Monday, rescue helicopters and ships searching for the aircraft rushed to investigate a yellow object that looked like a life raft. It turned out to be moss-covered trash floating in the ocean, once again dashing hopes after more than two days of fruitless search.

The search operation has involved 34 aircraft and 40 ships from several countries covering a 50-nautical mile radius from the point the plane vanished from radar screens between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Selamat Omar, a Malaysian whose son Mohamad Khairul Amri Selamat, 29, was a passenger on the flight, expected a call from him at the 6.30am arrival time. Instead he got a call from the airline, saying the plane was missing.

"We accept God's will. Whether he is found alive or dead, we surrender to Allah," Mr Selamat said.

There have been a few glimmers of hope, but so far no trace of the plane has been found.

On Sunday afternoon, a Vietnamese plane spotted a rectangular object that was thought to be one of the missing plane's doors, but ships working through the night could not locate it.

Then on Monday, a Singaporean search plane spotted the yellow object about 140 kilometres south-west of Tho Chu island, but it turned out to be some sea trash.

Malaysian maritime officials found some oil slicks in the South China Sea and sent a sample to a lab to see if it came from the plane. Tests showed the oil was not from an aircraft, Mr Azharuddin said.

Threat investigated

Meanwhile, a Taiwanese official said national security officials received an anonymous tip last week warning that terrorists were targeting Beijing’s international airport.

But the official, Cai Desheng, chief of Taiwan's national security bureau, told Taiwan’s official news agency that the call received last Tuesday was “not likely’’ to be linked to the disappearance four days later of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Nevertheless, the anonymous call was one of dozens of possible clues investigators are examining as they struggle to explain how the flight, carrying 239 people, simply vanished.

According to the report by Taiwan’s Central News Agency, a man speaking Chinese claimed to have information of planned attacks directed against Beijing’s airport and subway system by the East Turkestan Independence Movement, an Islamic-inspired group seeking independence for the Uighurs.

The caller identified himself as a member of a French-based anti-terrorist network and said he had called Taiwan’s national airline because he couldn’t reach anybody in Beijing.

As a result, Cai said that Taiwan “stepped up security checks at airport, especially for flights destined to Beijing”.

Security officials also notified their counterparts in Beijing.

Taiwan, which has been self-ruled since 1949, is considered a breakaway province by Beijing, but today enjoys close economic relations with the mainland.

Chinese authorities blamed Uighur separatists for the brutal knifing rampage at a train station in the city of Kunming in south-western China on March 1.

During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Beijing authorities claimed to have foiled amateurish plots by Uighurs to hijack or blow up airplanes.